November 19th, 1998 - Half-Life Sets FPS Gaming on Fire
by Chandrayog, Sat Nov 19, 2011 8:52 am
Sierra Entertainment (remember them?) knew
marketing REALLY well and they displayed this knowledge rather
succinctly in the way they doled out information for their, then,
upcoming First Person Shooter (FPS) title, Half-Life on PC. Information
was kept under lock and key, carefully given out to the press at
certain times so as to control who knew what and when and to ensure no
one knew the whole story. Couple this marketing strategy with the fact
that Half-Life was released during a highly competitive, and lucrative,
time for 3D card manufacturers and you have a mix for success (remember
the days when games supported ONE chipset an if you didn't have that one
you were relegated to "software" rendering?).
Half-Life was a unique game from this new company called Valve Corporation (they eventually did go on and make something called Steam for PC). By this time in history, there were a ton of titles using the Quake engine doing their best to emulate id's tour de force but Valve was different. Valve went another direction, they added a story to the mayhem, added many scripted events (think cutscenes but using the game engine so they are not so jarring to the immersion factor). On top of all of that, Half-Life was actually interesting to play, scary sometimes and was quite effective at making gamers believe they were in a top secret government facility that has gone terrible off course (no spoilers folks).
I remember following Half-Life in various gaming magazines such as PC Gamer, PC Games and Computer Gaming World and I fondly remember the day that I purchased the issue of PC Games that had a huge spread on Half-Life. Then came the first demo, over 100 megs (doesn't sound like much now but back on 56k that was a lifetime of downloading). I was blown away, even though on my computer it stuttered really bad I still trudged through the demo enjoying every second of it.
Half-Life was going to be available on Dreamcast but was cancelled at the last second but has successfully hit the PS2 in a weird "co-op" version. In recent years, Half-Life 2 has gone episodic, not sure if that is a viable distribution choice when releases are YEARS apart but Valve is trying it out to whatever fanfare they are receiving for it.
Half-Life was a unique game from this new company called Valve Corporation (they eventually did go on and make something called Steam for PC). By this time in history, there were a ton of titles using the Quake engine doing their best to emulate id's tour de force but Valve was different. Valve went another direction, they added a story to the mayhem, added many scripted events (think cutscenes but using the game engine so they are not so jarring to the immersion factor). On top of all of that, Half-Life was actually interesting to play, scary sometimes and was quite effective at making gamers believe they were in a top secret government facility that has gone terrible off course (no spoilers folks).
I remember following Half-Life in various gaming magazines such as PC Gamer, PC Games and Computer Gaming World and I fondly remember the day that I purchased the issue of PC Games that had a huge spread on Half-Life. Then came the first demo, over 100 megs (doesn't sound like much now but back on 56k that was a lifetime of downloading). I was blown away, even though on my computer it stuttered really bad I still trudged through the demo enjoying every second of it.
Half-Life was going to be available on Dreamcast but was cancelled at the last second but has successfully hit the PS2 in a weird "co-op" version. In recent years, Half-Life 2 has gone episodic, not sure if that is a viable distribution choice when releases are YEARS apart but Valve is trying it out to whatever fanfare they are receiving for it.
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